Then and Now

Hello everyone, and thank you for joining me for this Friday check-in.  Today, I've been hard at work on both re-coding and re-rendering.  The re-coding proceeds smoothly, and I'm continuing to plow my way through the many many lines of dialogue and code in the school.  It's a slog, but it's easy.  It's also incredibly dull and boring though, so I'm rewarding myself by firing up HS Studio and doing some re-renders.  As I've mentioned, the older ones are being updated, so I'd like to show you a few of those today.

Whereas the re-coding is being done map-by-map, the most logical way to do the re-rendering is in alphabetical order.  So today's images are brought to you by the letter A - for Abbie, and Adulteress.

Here is the original of the above image:

And here is the new one again:

Note that not only is the quality improved by the higher resolution, but the lighting has been reworked from the old, flat default to something more dynamic, which highlights Missy's face and makes the characters stand out a lot more.  On top of that, I spent a few minutes tidying up a number of other little things that annoyed me about the first version of this image.  Missy's hands now grip the wooden pillory tightly (as you can imagine they would since she's being pleasured in this image!) 

Note also how the adulteress's belly seems to sag unnaturally in the old image.  That is due to a bug with one of the HS2 mods, but I've managed to come up with a workaround to make her look more like she's supposed to now.  I'm trying to keep the actual angle and pose more or less the same while improving the look and quality.

Here is the previous incarnation of Abbie's alternate introduction image (that you get when you're late and have to first meet her at break instead of before school.)

It's... I mean, it's fine, but again the lighting is flat, her hands are floating above her legs and her neck is at a weird angle.  Let's take a look at what I've done with her.

Again, improved lighting makes her jump off the screen.  She's also been subtly reposed to look how an actual human should.  Despite being exactly the same character model, she just looks hotter somehow.  I really love this image.

Lastly, let's compare the bench hug that follows this one in the scene:

What is going on here?  Missy's body is twisted at a weird angle, with her left buttcheek clean off the seat, and the interaction of their bodies is just a bit... off.  Their arms are just sort of thrown around each other like they're afraid of being blown away by the wind or something.

This looks more like Abbie is actually comforting a distraught Missy.  Arms are in places that make sense, their bodies are positioned properly.  Missy's face came out a little weird, but on the whole, marked improvement.

Obviously, I'm not going to do this with all *checks* 2654 images currently in Missy, but with the older ones from 0.1 and parts of 0.2 that are from a time before I knew about many of these techniques, I feel the re-rendering presents a great opportunity to bring them up to snuff, so I beg you indulge me while I do so.  I hope you'll agree that the results are worth it!

Have a great weekend, and I'll be back Monday with more news on this epic undertaking!

Trinian